


A Set of Second Chances

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Banter, Blizzards & Snowstorms, Blow Jobs, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, STUCK IN A CABIN OH NO
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-29
Updated: 2020-03-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:41:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23378554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Getting trapped in an outpost cabin with the ghosts of the past has its advantages. Maes is positive that they can turn this whole fiasco into a victory, if Roy will just believe that he deserves one.
Relationships: Maes Hughes/Roy Mustang
Comments: 19
Kudos: 271





	A Set of Second Chances

**Author's Note:**

> This… was supposed to be fluff. I have no idea what it is, but it ain't quite that. :'D
> 
> Are the Hugheses poly??? Are they in a semi-open marriage??? Are they just super chill??? Does Gracia want to OT3 this shit??? I… don't know (although I suspect the last one). I just wanted to survive writing this without hitting the "nope" button for my own infidelity squick, so feel free to pick your favorite explanation for the deliberate vagueness. :') Just wanted to make sure to flag the fact that Hughes is definitely still happily married in this thing, in case that's not your cup of tea! ♥

Between the two of them, they manage to best the screaming, howling, hallooing wind and slam the door shut.

Maes trusts the locks. A man has to trust something after a while.

Roy sags back against the door, panting.

“This,” he says, “is _exactly_ why I don’t do missions anymore.”

Maes’s glasses are so hopelessly snow-spattered that he can barely see Roy two feet in front of him. Barely seeing Roy is a punishment, of course, but it’s not as bad as not being able to see Roy at all, which is a tragedy. “C’mon. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Heavens,” Roy says, making a big show of patting down all of his pockets. “Would you believe, I think I dropped it in the snow. Silly me. Would you like to go back outside into the _fucking blizzard_ with me to look for it?”

Maes has to swallow the laugh. Encouraging Roy always makes it worse. “You’re no fun.”

“That’s going to be the text of my epitaph, you know,” Roy says. “I was coerced at gunpoint to put a clause into my will.”

While making a face at him, Maes takes the glasses off and attempts to find a square centimeter of his coat that’s clear of melting snow in the hopes of drying them. “Why do you have a will?”

“Because I’m realistic,” Roy says. “Hence the ‘no fun’.” He’s still leaning against the door, although now with his arms folded. “You _don’t_?”

“Of course I do,” Maes says. “But I have a family. That’s different.”

Maes actually pinpoints the instant that Roy’s eyes go shuttered and dark. Curtains drawn; lights out; deadbolt slamming home.

There aren’t many things between Ishval and the present moment that Maes regrets, but Roy… is one of them. Roy is most of them. They were scared kids, and he knows that they both know that; he knows that Roy doesn’t hold it against him, because Roy’s better than he thinks he is and stronger than he understands.

But Maes screwed it up. He really, really did. And then he let it lie, because Roy had forgiven him the various and sundry trespasses, and pretending that he hadn’t ever set that charge beneath it and lit the fuse and scrambled off for cover seemed a whole lot simpler than trying to rebuild.

There’s always been so much else to do, so much else to say, so much to occupy himself with instead. So many excuses. So many back doors; so many easy ways out.

So it’s good, in the strangest possible sort of way, that they are now confined to a tiny outpost cabin twenty miles out from North City as the snowstorm from hell rages around them.

Roy still hasn’t stepped away from the door. If he insists on staying there all night long to make some sort of a hyper-dramatic point—which Maes honestly wouldn’t put past him—the draft is going to give him hypothermia, and he’ll probably lose at least one of his toes. That would be a terrible shame. He has nice toes. That’s not the sort of thing that most people can say, but in Roy’s case, it’s the truth.

Maes knows a forsaken battleground when he sees one, though, and he just lost all his traction. It may well be time for a graceful segue.

He turns to examine the rest of their erstwhile sanctuary, since Roy and the door have been the only parts of it that he’s paid attention to up until now. The Amestrian military has graciously provided them with a fireplace, complete with an opulently gracious mostly-depleted pile of firewood; a wooden chair; an equally wooden cot; and what looks like a grand total of three woolen blankets, which the last poor son of a bitch who prevailed upon this place folded up neatly.

Is it too cold for lice up here? Did Maes read that somewhere? Surely there has to be a silver lining. Just one. Surely that’s not asking for too much. He doesn’t want lice. Or fleas. Do people get fleas? Apparently the minute that he’s trapped in a cabin with Roy Mustang and the weight of many, many years of unspoken awkward conversations, he discovers a vast wealth of burning entomological questions. Interesting.

Speaking of burning, though—

“Hey, Flame Alchemist,” he says, gesturing. “I think it’d be a splendid time to do your thing.”

Roy draws a silent breath, but the slight movement of his shoulders betrays how deep it is. He starts past Maes to cross the room. “I thought you hated alchemy.”

“Well, yeah,” Maes says. As an experiment, he doesn’t step back to clear Roy’s path. “But I figure that I’d probably hate frostbite even more.”

Roy’s shoulders tense—again, just barely perceptible, and perhaps only noticeable then because Maes knows him so damn well—but he doesn’t change his course. The trailing hem of his coat grazes Maes’s shin as he passes. He’s looking straight ahead. “Sensible of you. Are you feeling all right?”

“No,” Maes says. “I’m freezing. You want the chair, or the bed?”

Roy crouches in front of the fireplace, and the way his coat pools around him is unreasonably picturesque. He has a knack for it. It’s always been annoying, but it’s rarely been quite this inconvenient. “What happens if I say that I outrank you, so I get both?”

“I’ll probably cry,” Maes says. “And that might crack your cold, stone heart, and you might have the timely revelation that military ambition is no replacement for human contact and meaningful connections, and then you might decide to share.”

Roy gives him a ticklingly severe sardonic look over one shoulder.

“It’s a joke,” Maes says.

“Jokes are funny,” Roy says, selecting one of the unimpressive-looking logs from the top of the stack and settling it among the half-exhausted ones in the hearth.

“Based on the results of frequent unrequested survey responses,” Maes says, “mine usually aren’t.”

Roy is trying to give him a baleful look now, but there is a slice of pain through it like the place that lightning splits a tree—charred and stark and sad and almost beautiful. Death and remaking. Cinders, embers, roots.

Roy seems to remember where they are: he turns towards the fireplace again, ducking his head, and his shoulders and his elbow shift as he peels off his fur-lined glove, fishes out an ignition glove instead, and fits it on. He’s angled his body so that Maes isn’t able to—or won’t _have_ to—see the array.

The wind gusts against the door, rattling it, straining the hinges; flecks of white stream in through the crack beneath it and scuttle across the floor.

Maes squares his shoulders, pushes his glasses up his nose, ignores the chill of the snowmelt in his hair sending a rivulet of cold water down his spine like a shitty premonition, and goes to sit down next to Roy.

He needs Roy to know he’s not afraid—not of that; not of this. Not of what Roy’s done, and not of who he is. Not of what he has been; not of what he could be.

Not of what _they_ could be.

Roy doesn’t visibly react to Maes’s proximity, or at least not yet: he concentrates for another second, eyes narrowed; and then he snaps his fingers, and the firewood ignites. It’s warmer than it ought to be right off the bat. He’s looking after them.

“ _Roy_ ,” Maes says, letting it curl hot and tight in his mouth before he gives it voice.

Roy hears the implication in it and tenses, leaning fractionally away from Maes’s shoulder next to his.

“Listen,” Maes says. “We talked about it—Gracia and me. We talked about the… possibility that—”

Roy’s jawline sharpens when he clenches his teeth. “The possibility that you and I would chase a North City serial killer into an unseasonably severe snowstorm and end up sequestered in an outpost cabin for a night?”

It’s pretty remarkable that Roy can bite out the words so sharply when so many of the words that he chose were unnecessarily long. Usually people have to chew on those for a while.

“Well,” Maes says, as breezily as he can bear, “we weren’t quite that specific, but—more or less. Just…”

Maes has to play his cards very carefully. Roy treats solitaire like tarot, and all his poker games are life and death.

Maes reaches out and brushes just his fingertips against Roy’s knee.

“She gets it,” he says. “And she doesn’t… mind.”

The slight uptick in the rhythm of Roy’s breathing is the only sign that there’s a war in him—his expression doesn’t change; his eyes fix stone-cold and steady on Maes’s hand.

“You can’t be serious,” Roy says.

“Tough cookies,” Maes says. “I am. We have a healthy relationship. We communicate openly.” Roy doesn’t move, but his eyes narrow a tiny bit more. “We talk about stuff. And she _knows_ me, Roy. She understands that how I love is part of who I am, and how I love is just…”

He has to withdraw his hand from Roy’s knee, because he needs both of them for waving around himself effusively. He still has his gloves on anyway. With any luck, in another fifteen seconds or so, the fire will have warmed this little pocket of the room enough that he can change that.

Roy watches him guardedly. Maes can’t blame him. None of this is his fault for once.

“Excessive?” Roy says when Maes’s gesturing fails to produce adjectives.

“Big,” Maes says. “Encompassing.”

“Extreme,” Roy says.

“ _Powerful_ ,” Maes says. “That’s the whole point. It doesn’t… I don’t…” He takes a breath. It’s not enough, but it’ll have to do. “…stop. I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know if I can.”

Roy looks at him. Roy has changed so much—slowly, slowly, over all these years. His eyes used to be soft enough to settle in, like velvet; like sooty mist. You could wrap yourself up warmly and sleep in peace and silence.

Now he can turn them into black ice, with edges like volcanic glass.

“Don’t,” Roy says.

Maes can’t tear his gaze away from Roy, so it takes several attempts from his cold-numbed fingers to pull his gloves off blindly.

His fingertips are probably freezing, but he extends them anyway. If he can just—if they can just—

It’s not _that_ different than it used to be. Roy knows how flimsy words are; Roy knows how susceptible they are to being twisted and manipulated and repurposed. Roy knows how easy it is to lie. Actions matter more.

If Maes can just touch him, he’ll remember how—

The man still moves so fast that Maes’s eyes can barely track him: he feels the fingers cinching in tight around his wrist before the visual cues have registered. The three-inch gap between his fingertips and Roy’s jaw looks like a chasm. He wriggles his fingers to try to inject a tiny bit of humor into the whole situation, which—unsurprisingly, he supposes—spectacularly fails.

“ _Don’t_ ,” Roy says.

The ragged note in his voice would have made the old Maes wilt and surrender.

But he’s different, now, too. He’s stronger than he was—bolstered by the faith that other people have in him. He knows, these days, which battles he can win.

“We talked about it,” Maes says. “She said she wouldn’t mind. She said it would probably be good for both of us, actually, and it wouldn’t bother her at all.”

Roy’s grip tightens, and his voice sharpens, but Maes still knows him too well to be afraid of him. “Do you have that in writing?”

Maes still knows, too, that you have to go toe-to-toe with him and parry every strike as it comes if you want him to make him back down. You can’t take prisoners, and you can’t pull your punches. If he gets you on the ropes, he’s won.

“Have what?” Maes says. “A signed affidavit from my wife with a bunch of bullet points of reasons why she understands that me still loving you doesn’t make me love her any less? I thought you hated paperwork.”

For one fraction of a second, the marble cracks. The sheer immensity of the surfacing pain bends Maes’s will almost to the point of breaking—it’s like a raw wound, uncovered and bleeding freely; Roy has been _carrying_ this behind the genial little smiles all this time—

Roy shoves Maes’s hand away from him and stands up so fast that his coat and his cavalry skirt swirl behind him. He paces towards the door—seven short, swift, regimented strides. He makes five back in Maes’s direction and then pivots and starts for the door again. Even over the wail of the wind, the heels of his boots crack sharply on the floor.

“You’re full of shit,” Roy says.

“I’m not,” Maes says. “You know I’m not. I trust her, and you trust me.”

Roy stops in front of the door and looks back, folding his arms over his chest again. The wind makes the walls creak. Maes has regained what feels like sixty percent of the normal amount of sensation in his fingertips, and he’s increasingly confident that he can feel his toes.

“It doesn’t matter,” Roy says. “It doesn’t matter what I think, or what I—” Maes knows, knows in his guts and his bones and the burn of the unspoken things in his throat, that Roy just swallowed the word _feel_. “Or—what she supposedly said, or what _you_ say. I am _not_ going to help you cheat on—”

“It’s not cheating,” Maes says. “It’s not like that.”

“I don’t care,” Roy says. “I don’t care what it’s ‘like’, what you think it’s like—even if you—if _she_ —” He fights his winter glove off, shoves it into his coat pocket, and pushes his bare hand through his hair before he drops it at his side. “It doesn’t _matter_ ,” he says, “because I’m not going to torture myself with having this and _you_ and all of it for one fucking night and then wake up and go back to _nothing_.”

Maes’s chest clenches, but he forces the word out past it. “Roy—”

“ _No_ ,” Roy says, fingers curling tight into the sleeves of his coat. “You don’t _get_ it. All right? You don’t. You’ve been happy all this time. And that’s—fine. It is. It’s good. I’m happy for you. I’ve made my peace with it; I’ve found ways to—I can deal with that. I have made myself move on enoughto get by. But you don’t—you can’t—you _can’t_ —offer me yesterday and then take it away again tomorrow.” He swallows, breathes in, works his jaw, and looks at the ceiling. “That’s not fucking fair, Maes. I don’t want it. I don’t want it as a game. I don’t want it once. I don’t want it if you’re just toying with the idea for nostalgia’s sake. And I don’t want it if I can’t see her _face_ when she says that she doesn’t care about what you do and who you do it with when she isn’t around.”

Maes’s voice emerges from him sounding much weaker than he was hoping for. “You’re making this sound very sordid.”

At least that shifts Roy’s gaze from the unremarkable wooden beams of the ceiling and back down to him, even if Roy seems to have half a mind to try to incinerate him with the gaze in question. “That’s because it _is_.”

“No, it’s not,” Maes says. He gathers himself together, scrabbles for the dregs of his wits, and stands. He keeps his hands open—fingers loose. No fists here. This isn’t a fight. That’s the part that Roy’s missing. “ _Listen_ to me.” He takes one step closer, then another, and a third. “I’m not… Nobody’s going to take it away. _I’m_ not going to take it away.” Roy moved seven paces away to pin himself back against the door. Maes takes the fourth step towards him. “She wants both of us to be happy. Okay? She cares about you, too. And she knows what happened, and she knows what’s happened to you since then—”

Roy snorts, but he’s leaning back harder against the door, as if he can dematerialize and disappear through it if he pushes with enough force. “The overworking and underpayment and constant self-imposed suffering, do you mean?”

“The loneliness,” Maes says.

Roy glares at him—wounded animal aggression. Maes knows. He _knows_.

Maes takes the fifth step.

“Roy,” he says.

“Don’t,” Roy says. “I’m not playing. It’s not funny.”

Step six.

“ _Stop_ ,” Roy says.

“Sure,” Maes says, since the next step will be the collision, which he may have to work himself up to in any case.

Roy glares at him. Even this close, the effect is muted by the fact that Maes has all the power here. The trick is turning it like a key instead of swinging it like a bludgeon.

God, he hopes he’s up to it.

“I want you to be happy, too,” Maes says. “And—you were. Weren’t you? Back then. With me.”

Roy’s shoulders rise and fall with a breath. He swallows. He keeps his expression blank and his eyes cold, but his fingers curl tighter in his sleeves, until the folds of wool around them look like sunbursts.

“That’s irrelevant,” Roy says, evenly. “It’s ancient history, and everything is differ—”

“Not everything,” Maes says. He takes the half-step, takes the leap of faith; lowers his voice, tilts his head, lets the tremor of the truth through in it. “I miss you.”

Roy sets his teeth. “You talk to me on the phone every single day,” he says. “About, I might add, how much you adore your perfect little family and your amazing wife.”

“You know what I mean,” Maes says. Roy does, too. Roy has always understood him better than anyone has any right to, in spite—or because—of all the thickening smokescreens that Maes puts up between his intellect and a world that would gladly kill him for it. “I miss _you_. The real you. The parts that get buried and smothered and hidden away.”

The tip of Roy’s tongue slides across his upper lip. “Leave it.”

“No,” Maes says. “I miss how close we were. I miss how much it was, and how good it felt, and how reckless we were about _letting_ ourselves feel it. I miss how gentle you could be when you knew it wouldn’t come back to bite you. I miss making you feel safe enough to show yourself. I miss making you feel wanted.”

Roy clenches his jaw again, but an old, familiar heat has started to flicker in his eyes, and Maes can see his pulse beating in his throat. “You should concentrate on missing your wife.”

“Come _on_ , Roy,” Maes says. “What’s so wrong with it? We’re all grownups. We spend enough time following other people’s rules. Just this once—what’s stopping us from trying to have it all?”

Not for the first time, Roy Mustang flouts the laws of physics: he somehow manages to create another half-inch of space between them. Maes can only imagine that he’s gradually merging with the door. “You know damn well that the world doesn’t work like that.”

“Fuck the world,” Maes says. “Fuck the whole world, and in particular anybody who tells you or me what we’re allowed to do or feel or want. Isn’t that the point? You’ve been swimming upstream since you started. Isn’t it about damn time that you just _took_ something that you want?”

Roy breathes in and out very slowly. “That’s not how the social contract—”

“Fuck the social contract, too,” Maes says.

Roy musters a tiny, tiny, paper-thin and paper-fragile smile. “If I’d known that you were so hellbent on shredding the fabric of civilization as we know it this week, I wouldn’t have agreed to come with you.”

“Yes, you would,” Maes says. “Because you still fucking love me, and you’re just trying to be noble because you think that it’s what _I_ want.” He smiles back—sharper by half this time. “Look me in the eyes and tell me that I’m wrong.”

He can see Roy trying for anger—pent-up resentment; old hurt scarred over into knitted lines like armor.

And he watches it disintegrate.

And he watches the weary, weary sadness well up underneath.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been noble in my life,” Roy says.

“See?” Maes says. He knows he has a failsafe roguish grin stockpiled someplace for times like this. “Why start now?”

Roy tries to smile back, which somehow makes it worse. “There is, by definition, a first time for everything.”

“Okay,” Maes says. “So start tomorrow.”

Roy holds onto this deep breath for three full seconds before he lets it out as a sigh.

Maes does the eyebrow thing, which almost makes Roy crack a real smile. “Was that a ‘yes’?”

“Idiot,” Roy says, but the love in it makes the second syllable stick and betray him. “You think I’m going to sacrifice plausible deniability just like that?”

Maes reaches out again. “It was worth a shot.”

Roy doesn’t stop him this time. Roy doesn’t duck away; he doesn’t retreat. He doesn’t move at all.

But his eyes—

Maes’s fingertips graze his cheekbone and then slide down his jaw. Roy’s eyes slide halfway shut; he shivers so slightly that it could almost, almost be the cold. His mouth works—once again not quite a smile, but Maes can read in the lines of it that it wants to be.

Maes pushes his hand further, threading his fingers into Roy’s hair where it’s still damp from the melted snow; he wishes his hand wasn’t so damn cold, because he wants to feel every single strand. Roy’s ear is freezing. Roy’s breath is warm.

Roy’s mouth has always had an extremely particular gravity. Maes’s body knows damn well how to fight it, but this time—

This time, he lets it drag him all the way in.

It’s not exactly what most people might qualify as a kiss for the history books, or for the romance books, or for the poetry ones, or for any record of human activity whatsoever. Both of their lips are chapped and dry as hell from the desiccating cold; their teeth meet before their tongues do, and they both jerk back; Maes’s glasses crush against Roy’s cheek and end up askew. It’s clumsy and half-numbed and unfamiliar, and Maes closes his eyes on instinct and then regrets it.

But for all of its small disasters, it’s more beautiful than Maes knows how to describe.

In that first instant, with Maes’s heart in his throat and his knees unsteady and his mouth full of Roy’s taste for the first time in a decade, he wonders if he’s in too deep.

In the second, Roy’s hands slide up his chest and drag up his throat, one still clothed in an ignition glove, and then they fist themselves into his hair so tightly that his scalp tingles. Roy pushes to tilt his head, shifts the angle, twists his tongue—hungry and desperate, like a compulsion, but still with such _finesse_.

Maes is in just deep enough.

Roy pushes him backwards—away from the door, towards the fire; into the wall of spreading warmth, although Maes wouldn’t go so far as to call it _heat_ just yet. He’s not sure that exists out here.

He does his damnedest to stumble gracefully, so that he won’t fall on his ass and drag Roy with him; Roy’s gloved hand disentangles itself from his hair and slides in under his scarf, past the fur-lined lapels of his coat, and Roy’s thumb strokes back and forth across his collarbone. It feels like recognition, and something like a claim.

Roy then bites down rather viciously on Maes’s bottom lip, which leans more strongly towards the latter.

Maes draws back just enough to grin at him, in spite of how damn much that smarts. “ _There_ he is.” Roy rolls his eyes, so Maes says, “Hello, gorgeous,” which makes Roy’s breath stop halfway up his throat.

Roy makes a valiant effort at holding his face steady even though it’s too late. “That doesn’t impress me as much as it used to.”

Maes curls both hands into the front of his coat and pulls him two steps closer to the fire. “You’re blushing.”

“I am _not_ ,” Roy says. “It’s the fucking cold.”

Maes uses the leverage to pull him in and breathe against his neck. “Or the prospect of cold fucking?”

Roy goes so still for so long that Maes’s heart skitters, and he draws back to look.

“Shit,” Roy says, somewhat faintly. “Ten years ago—”

“Don’t say that,” Maes says.

“—I wouldn’t have cared,” Roy goes on, which at least fits into a lifelong pattern of pointedly ignoring Maes’s excellent advice. “But it’s… so _cold_. And this floor would be murder; it’s like stone, and my back—”

“Stop,” Maes says.

Roy leans his forehead against Maes’s and closes his eyes, which makes it a tiny bit less horrible that he wants to talk about how old they are instead of indulging in some furtive frostbite-dodging sex.

“You started it,” Roy says.

“Liar,” Maes says.

“You keep talking about how nothing’s different,” Roy says. He doesn’t open his eyes, but his mouth shifts in a way that Maes doesn’t especially like. “Everything is. The whole world’s different.”

“Not all of it,” Maes says. He taps a fingertip against Roy’s jaw. “You, for instance, Colonel Babyface, have barely aged a day.”

Roy’s eyelids part just enough to display a sliver of a dark look. “My heavens. It’s no wonder that so many people hurl themselves at you and strip naked. You’re such a catch. Surely they tell legends of you in the cafeteria at Central Command. Does your mail cubby regularly overflow with perfumed love notes full of anonymous poetry and—”

Maes laughs, and the way that the tension diffuses out of him all at once leaves him giddy. The spark of mischief in Roy’s eyes lights more kindling in the core of him; before he’s caught his breath, he catches Roy’s mouth with his again and steals another kiss. And then another. And then another after that.

It’s not really stealing, is it, once Roy starts giving back as good as he gets?

“C’mon,” Maes manages when they pause for breath, not that there seems to be much of any oxygen left in the room. That’s got to be Roy’s fault, although in a rather different way than usual. “For old times’ sake.”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk about how old we are,” Roy says, because Roy is a bit of a bastard, and unfortunately it’s part of his charm. “Specifically, how excruciatingly, inevitably, and undeniably we’ve aged, and how we’re creeping closer to forty with every passing minute, and h—”

“That’s it,” Maes says. “It is _high_ time somebody shut you up.”

“I should charge a fee when people tell me that,” Roy says. “I could afford to reti— _Maes_.”

It’s too late: Maes is on his knees. The floor is, as it happens, rather unrelenting, but like hell is he giving Roy more ammunition on that front.

Strangely, despite the fact that he undoes the fly of his own uniform multiple times a day, it’s been so many years since he did it backwards that he fumbles with it. There’s a possibility that Roy’s proximity also has a confounding effect on Maes’s dexterity, since a disproportionate amount of the blood in his body has directed itself to one extremity in particular, but he’s not giving Roy that to run with, either.

Roy won’t be doing any running in the immediate future, though, because Maes just got his pants open and pressed a big, wet, shameless kiss to his half-hard cock right through his underwear. Life doesn’t offer too many unequivocal messages, so Maes tries to give them when he can.

Roy says, “ _Fuck_ ,” faintly and with feeling, which Maes thinks is a good sign that today’s message was received.

Looking up at him from here is so transcendent that Maes has no choice but to spend a few seconds savoring it—Roy with his head thrown back, with his eyes crushed shut, biting down hard on his bottom lip, dragging in a deep breath—

And, of course, using it to say, “Take a picture; lasts longer.”

“Careful what you wish for,” Maes says.

“You wouldn’t dare,” Roy says. “You wouldn’t risk having pornographic photos of me in your h— _oh, God_.”

Given the extraordinarily poor job that Roy has been doing of following the _shut up_ order, Maes took matters—and underwear—into his own hands; and then Roy’s cock into his mouth.

It really has been a long damn time, but the adage about riding a bicycle applies. Maes fully intends to make a remarkably tasteless joke about that later.

For the moment, though, the only taste is Roy; and this is the only thing he cares to accomplish. This is the only thing there _is_.

He fixes his hands on Roy’s hips for leverage, which boasts the added benefit of bringing the fall of Roy’s coat partway around him. The warmer he gets, the more he can focus on lathing Roy’s dick so thoroughly and well that it drives his favorite idiot directly over the brink of oblivion.

He hasn’t lost his touch: he knows that he balances the force and the friction perfectly right off the bat, because Roy’s breath catches three seconds in and stutters on its way back out. Maes does, in his excitement, forget to mind his teeth, but a hiss out of Roy cures him of that in a hurry, which frees him to start tracing meaningless designs with the tip of his tongue. _That_ earns him an impatient little growl, which resonates through Roy’s entire body in a way that floods Maes’s system with endorphins. They’re zingy. This is _good_.

He ramps up the pressure gradually—sucking harder, taking Roy in deeper—and the unceremonious game of chicken with his own gag reflex… that part he didn’t miss. He’d managed to erase the sore jaw from all of the rosy remembrances, too. Oh, well.

The way that Roy groans when Maes picks up the tempo makes it more than worth it; the way that Roy fists a hand in his hair—the way that Roy’s hips jerk; the way that his breath hitches, and his body tenses head to toe—

Maes has his tongue pressed up against the underside of Roy’s dick. His first warning is Roy rasping out the sound of his name; his second is a twist of the fingers in his hair; his third—the last one, which he supposes is fully fair—is the pulse of Roy’s cock in his mouth.

He’s not entirely sure why people spit: cum isn’t exactly a delicacy, obviously, but it doesn’t taste _bad_ , and he’s always found that there’s something quite carnally satisfying about swallowing it down—a sense of completeness, possibly. It’s also just damned _convenient_ , since it leaves you with a grand total of nothing to clean up.

Roy gasps for air and blinks his way back into himself after a handful of seconds, but they’re among the loveliest seconds of Maes’s life. He looks young and disarmed and blissful for the duration of them. He looks like he used to. He looks unguarded and unafraid.

When the current version of Roy returns, he winces and starts trying to fix Maes’s hair instead of buttoning his pants.

“Sorry,” he says.

Maes arcs an eyebrow. He must look debauched and delicious in equal measure; his glasses are crooked, his jaw aches, his hair’s a mess, and he hasn’t put his mouth through that particular workout in ten years.

He licks his lips.

“I’m not,” he says.

“Of course not,” Roy says, striving to keep his voice steady as he fusses intently with Maes’s hair, like anyone in the universe is liable to walk through that door and give a shit that it got disheveled in the course of oral sex. “You’re far too busy being a menace.”

“Tough job,” Maes says. “Someone’s got to do it.”

Roy has finally moved on from pretending to be invested in the state of Maes’s appearance to just stroking at his hair, which Maes suspects might have been what both of them wanted anyway. In order to encourage that sort of behavior in the future, he does Roy’s pants back up for him, and then he accepts the hand that Roy offers him to help him back up to his feet.

He tries to suppress the grimace as he straightens, but a man can only do so much.

Roy favors him with a wry look. “May I?”

Maes is so damn happy to see him letting this happen—to see him letting it _in_ —that he’d cave to just about anything. “Fine. Just this once.”

Roy smiles beatifically. “Thank you.” He clears his throat. “ _I told you so_.”

“Get fucked,” Maes says. It feels like his ribcage is full of sunbeams.

“Just did, thanks,” Roy says. “It was excellent.”

“Mr. Mustang,” Maes says, “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

  


* * *

  


They end up appropriating the pallet from the cot and spreading it as wide as they can on the floor in front of the fire. After some consideration, they lay one of the blankets on top of it, and the remaining two on top of themselves. They have to curl up together on their sides to have a hope in hell of keeping their fragile joints off of the unrelenting floor, but that’s a blessing in disguise if Maes has ever seen one. Roy insisted on being the one further from the fire by pulling rank, which makes very little sense in a very Roy sort of way. After they’ve settled, and Maes has Roy’s arms around him, Roy’s chest against his back, and Roy’s face buried in the fur on the collar of his coat—when it’s all too easy to hear Roy breathing softly, and to share his warmth—Maes allows himself one small moment of modest triumph.

Okay, maybe it’s less modest than it could be, given the circumstances, but he feels like he deserves to celebrate a _bit_.

“Hey,” he says before Roy gets too cozy altogether and falls asleep on him—which is the overall objective, sure, but what kind of best friend-slash-antagonist-slash-renewed-lover would he be if he didn’t muck it up a bit in the meantime? “How do you feel?”

“Amazing,” Roy mumbles. Maes thinks that’s the answer for one beautiful second before Roy follows up with “How _do_ you find the time?”

Maes makes a face. Roy can’t see it, but he’ll know. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Father of the year,” Roy says. “Decorated military officer. Personal therapist. When did you train? Do you ever sleep?”

Maes bites back a grin. Roy’s stupid sarcasm always amused him more than it should have. The man is a danger to himself and others. “Shut up. I’m being nice.”

“Out of self-interest,” Roy says.

“Obviously,” Maes says. “Although I prefer to call it ‘survival’.”

“If you ask me about my mother,” Roy says, “I’m leaving.”

“There’s a blizzard,” Maes says.

“I know,” Roy says. “I’ve weighed the options, and freezing to death is preferable to enduring your amateur therapy session. I’m willing to bet you charge an hourly rate, too. Blizzards are free.”

This position is perfect in more ways than one: elbowing Roy in the ribs barely requires shifting at all. “Don’t be an asshole.”

“What if that’s how I feel?” Roy says. “I feel like being an asshole. Checkmate. Go to sleep.”

“Not until you tell me,” Maes says.

Roy snorts. Cute. “I’m not your wife.”

“I am intimately aware of that,” Maes says.

He wishes that it wasn’t so wonderful to _feel_ Roy smirking against the back of his neck. “Well-put.”

Maes elbows him again. If he leaves any bruises, he’ll kiss them better. He’s become an expert on curing boo-boos over the past couple of years. “So?”

“Ask me tomorrow,” Roy says.

“Riza’s right,” Maes says. “Procrastination never sleeps.”

“Bingo,” Roy says.

Then Roy kisses the nape of Maes’s neck, and Maes’s heart just about stops.

He manages to survive that particular dance with death, and then he manages to scrounge up some words again.

“Neither will we,” he says, “unless you answer the question.”

“Blackmail,” Roy mutters.

Maes pats Roy’s right arm where it’s wrapped around him. “Negotiating.”

“I’m going to bite you,” Roy says.

“Kinky,” Maes says. “I’m into it. What gives? You’re obsessed with the sound of your own voice right up until someone humbly requests a bit of honesty?”

“Rude,” Roy says.

“You know,” Maes says, “now that I said it like that, it… actually makes a lot of sense.”

“Annoying,” Roy mumbles.

“Takes one to know one, babe,” Maes says. “Wait ’til you push me to the point of a poke war.”

“Try it,” Roy says, “and you’ll lose a finger.”

“I have ten to go through,” Maes says, patting Roy’s arm again for emphasis. “Are you sure you can put up with it for that long?”

“Don’t underestimate me,” Roy says. “Or the power of spite.”

Maes transitions into stroking Roy’s arm instead of patting it, since that might have a soothing effect. “I mean it, okay? I want to know.”

Roy nestles his face into the back of Maes’s neck again and breathes out slowly.

“I don’t know yet,” he says. “It’s… a significant… change. My primary emotional response is still ‘confused’.”

Maes tries to keep his voice light. “Confused-but-overall-pretty-good, perhaps?”

“You blew me,” Roy says.

“Is that a ‘yes’?” Maes asks.

“That’s a ‘you cheated to increase the likelihood of a yes’,” Roy says.

Maes wrangles one of Roy’s hands up far enough to kiss the knuckles. “You’re getting warmer.” Roy’s fingertips feel chilly; he pins them between both of his palms. “But… good. Probably good. Likely good. Right?”

Roy sighs much louder than Maes thinks is necessary, especially this close. “If I say it, will you go to sleep?”

“Not if I know that you’re just saying it to be conciliatory,” Maes says.

“Conciliation is better than blackmail,” Roy says.

“That’s subjective,” Maes says.

“It’s _definitely_ not,” Roy says.

“It is if I say so,” Maes says.

Roy is silent for a moment. Maes can only assume that the sheer ferocity of his scintillating wit has finally—

Roy sounds more scandalized than awestruck. “Did you… Did you just try to use your dad voice on me?”

“Depends,” Maes says. “Did you like it?”

“ _No_ ,” Roy says.

“Oh,” Maes says. “Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.”

“I really, really can,” Roy says.

“Spoilsport,” Maes says. “So—”

“Go to sleep,” Roy says, but he’s nestled in close again, and his arms tighten around Maes’s chest, and that… that feels like a good sign. Life doesn’t offer too many of those, either.

Maes settles down, adjusts the blankets, and flattens his hands on top of Roy’s to try to warm them faster. What the hell happened to their gloves, anyway? “You know what I think?”

“I have a premonition,” Roy says, “that you’re about to tell me whether I like it or not.”

“Is is the psychic sensitivity they promote you for?” Maes asks. “Or the dashing good looks?”

“It’s the self-restraint,” Roy says.

“I guess I do still have all my fingers,” Maes says. “Thanks for that. I think—”

Roy sighs loudly, but he messed up bad this time: Maes can hear in it that he’s trying not to smile.

“I think,” Maes says, “that we should go on missions more often.”

This time, Roy sighs so loud that Maes is surprised that he doesn’t put the fire out.

The best part is that he thinks Maes is joking. He’ll probably continue to think that right up until Maes starts stealing mission requests off of other people’s desks and calling dibs on the ones that will make the best dates.

He snuggles in and allows himself one little evil grin.

“Sweet dreams, Roy,” he says.


End file.
